


Misunderstandings + A Matter of Time

by Nevcolleil



Category: MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Role Reversal, M/M, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, Not Actually Unrequited Love, Possibly Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 20:11:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18080126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevcolleil/pseuds/Nevcolleil
Summary: When Thornton called Jack in one day and told him he was being slapped with some young, tough-guy partner - this All-American, boy-next-door jock type... who’d caught her eye busting heads for the Delta Force - Jack hadn’t held a lot of hope for the success of the partnership.





	Misunderstandings + A Matter of Time

When Thornton called Jack in one day and told him he was being slapped with some young, tough-guy partner - this All-American, boy-next-door jock type... who’d caught her eye busting heads for the Delta Force - Jack hadn’t held a lot of hope for the success of the partnership.

He’d pictured the kind of frat bro/good ol’ boy/jarhead that Jack had been butting heads with all his life. The type with stars and stripes between his ears, but not a whole lot else - just so much muscle mass to point at a destination and let loose. The battering ram to Jack’s scalpel, more or less.

The kid’s name is _Angus_ , for Christ’s sake. He’d played pigskins in high school, hockey in college. He was dating this pretty little blonde from Tech at the time (‘ _Nikki with an ‘i’_ ’) and his file said he’d been trained in every martial art that Jack had ever heard of (including a few that Jack couldn’t rightly _pronounce_ ).

Now Jack has never had a difficulty holding his own in a fight. He’s better at it than most, in fact - even against hotshots half his age. He _can_ handle a gun, handle it like a hot date, but he chooses _not_ to, and some folks form ideas about that.

Delta Johnny Chain of Command, Jack had assumed, was sure to have ‘ideas’ about it. About why Jack never needs a gun in the first place... About one of the reasons he and the Army had eventually parted ways. (Jack has never had to be _asked_ to _tell_.)

But. Well. You know what they say you do when you assume.

And speaking of asses... Angus Macgyver’s is _exceptional_.

It’s just- you know. Attached to a guy that _isn’t_ , as it turns out, just the additional brawn to Jack’s considerable brains. Isn’t, either, just the pretty face that had nearly had Jack tripping over his two feet the moment they were introduced. (It is patently _unfair_ that a man can get into as many brawls as Mac has in his young life and still look that pretty. There should be laws. Several of them.)

The first thought that actually popped into Jack’s head when he and Macgyver met was: ‘Who’s the surfer boy with the sweet bod?’ The second was: ‘Holy shit, no. He’s adorable too.’

Then Jack popped off with some nonsense about babysitters being placed under the watch of the babysat (just typical Jack stuff, pushing buttons), and the next thing he knew, he was flat on his back on Thornton’s office floor, a smirking Angus Macgyver standing over him with a conciliatory hand held out to him.

Jack was already in love.

Now Jack’s several years into being head over heels for his badass with the big heart. The Sundance to his Butch. The _steady hand_ to his scalpel... Breaking through Jack’s occasionally cyclical thoughts and making simple decisions, that have presented themselves in their most complicated forms to Jack’s always racing brain, simple again.

Mac, as far as Jack can tell, genuinely appreciates their partnership himself - he values the friendship they’ve grown, their bond, just like Jack values it. 

Mac’s even said, a time or two, that he wouldn’t want to do what they do with anybody else. (God - did that turn Jack’s overgrown nerd heart dumb, for _days_ , thumping stupidly whenever Jack thought of it and looked at Mac directly.)

There’s no way this won’t end in heartbreak and tears.

At least not for Jack... Jack is relatively certain.

One day - Jack can see it now- Mac will say one heartbreakingly sincere thing too many... He’ll be brave and loyal, the way he always is - or he’ll look at Jack that way he sometimes does, just after Jack’s improvised something, like Jack’s hung the moon and updated it with butcher paper and a watch battery. And Jack’s heart will turn _so_ dumb that he’ll actually say something about his unwelcome feelings... Or someone will see something. 

Or.

Jack will punch someone. 

Someone he shouldn’t.

For something he really should have just laughed off if it wasn’t too close to what Jack could almost wish were true.

“I can’t believe you did that,” Mac says to him, on the drive home from work that day. (Technically, a broken hand has nothing to do with Jack’s ability to drive _himself_ wherever he damned well needs. But Mac’s always interpreted the intended ‘you watch my back, I’ll watch yours’ nature of their partnership as more of a ‘you watch your back, and I’ll be hawk-eying it at the same time, _daring_ the universe to fuck with you’ situation. He didn’t even give Jack a choice, just held his hand out for Jack’s keys, and he’d looked so disappointed - or maybe embarrassed - by the scene that Jack had made, that Jack contritely went along with it.)

These are the first words Mac has said to him since Jack laid out that smarmy spook-charmer who’d insulted his boy - Jack’s _just_ realized.

“Look, I know the punching out ignorant assholes thing is more your usual schtick than mine,” he immediately tries to apologize, earning himself one of Macgyver’s impressively non-impressed snorts of derision.

“But you understand, right?” Jack goes fishing. “Why I couldn’t let the thing he said stand?”

“Right, Jack,” Mac says in a tone that is the _least_ right of any tone he’s ever taken with Jack before.

“I mean it! He doesn’t get to talk about you like that. Angus, _no one_ gets to talk about you like that,” Jack explains, dead serious. He knows that people have likely said the same things behind their backs before - that strangers are always getting the wrong idea. Like: why would a guy with as many degrees under his belt as Jack Dalton drag a “pretty young thing” like Angus around with him, even on the missions that don’t require beating people up or shooting things - if he wasn’t screwing him? Things like: what’s a guy like _Angus MacGyver_ , posterboy of the All-American badass, doing spending so much of his free time with a nerdy old man like Jack? Besides kissing his not-actually-boss’s ass - figuratively _and_ literally - that is.

Jack’s not sure if he prefers the people who just assume Angus has daddy issues and Jack’s stepped in as his surrogate father to the nasty stuff, but he is sure of this: Angus deserves a hell of a lot more respect than for anyone - _ever_ \- to say any of that shit out loud. 

“Yeah, except it didn’t sound much like it was _me_ you were sticking up for,” Mac snaps.

 _That_ \- 

Okay, that Jack isn’t entirely sure what to do with.

“Hey, now,” Jack finds himself changing gears mid-sentence - lips flapping for a moment in a no-doubt _highly_ comical manner, but Mac’s death-grip on the steering wheel becomes no less deadly, and Jack watches that finely chiseled jaw of his shift like Mac is grinding his teeth the way he does from time to time. “What is _that_ supposed to mean?”

“You know what I mean, Jack,” Mac is quick to counter back, taking his next turn with such _deliberate_ care - another glaringly typical Mac-is-real-mad indicator.

“I absolutely do not. If I did, I wouldn’t-”

“I _know_ how you feel, okay?” Mac says, in way too calm and level a voice for saying words that pack that much punch. At least so far as Jack is concerned. They hit him like a one-two, _hard_ , straight to the gut, and Mac sounds like he’s just discussing the weather. “And I understand, I do. But you didn’t have to _assault_ Stafford to make your point. Nobody was paying him any attention. Nobody was going to get the wrong idea about us just because some _asshole_ started running off at the mouth... Everyone who knows us knows that nothing like that is _ever_ going to happen between us.”

Okay, maybe not the weather.

Nobody sounds so _pitying_ discussing the fricking weather... And Mac is laying it all out so simply, so straight-forwardly. No ambiguity in his words whatsoever. As excise as a sniper’s bullet - his specialty.

Forget having his heart break... Jack’s afraid, for a moment, that his heart might just _evaporate_ into a fine red dust.

He’s barely even conscious of the next two turns that lead to his house. Could have blacked out between the death knell of that truly _piteous_ hope that had managed to hide itself away in Jack’s chest, apparently, for all of this time, and the moment that Mac parks his truck in Jack’s driveway.

Luckily he must snap to quickly enough, because Mac doesn’t seem to be waiting impatiently when Jack finally reaches for the handle to the passenger-side door. 

Or not so lucky, because Mac doesn’t seem to be done talking.

“Look, I just-” he starts, but Jack raises a hand and he stops.

“It’s alright, Angus,” Jack says quietly, one foot out the door.

He’s not sure what about that, exactly, grates - what Mac expects from Jack after a call-out-and-take-down like that, but something wavers in Mac’s voice as he protests.

“It’s al- I don’t _feel_ alright, Jack,” Mac says, voice rising in helpless- Jack thinks it must be anger. Tortures himself a bit and lets himself consider that it may very well be disgust... 

Mac rubs his hand over his face the way Jack’s watched him do a thousand times as Mac’s waited, somewhat patiently, for Jack to explain a plan he hasn’t actually come up with yet... or pull off an improvisation Jack’s promised will work - often thanks to the dismembered corpse of yet _another_ of Mac’s inevitably doomed cell phones. Jack has to clench his jaw tight, grit his teeth, seeing it, so that his lips don’t tremble. “I don’t expect you to- To be okay with how _I_ feel...” Mac continues. “But I thought at the very least that you wouldn’t- I never thought you’d _rub my face in it_.”

“Oh, is that what I did?” Jack can’t help but snap.

Mac looks him dead in the eyes and says, “Yeah, Jack. You did.”

And he _doesn’t_ look disgusted, is the thing. He looks-

God. He looks _hurt_. Like he’s not the one rejecting Jack here but the one being rejected... Jack’s pretty sure his lip _does_ tremble as he swallows that thought down.

But the bitterness that had been helplessly rising in Jack ebbs away as if it never existed. The last thing he’d ever wanted to do was to hurt Angus.

“I’m _sorry_ , Mac,” Jack says, forcing himself to turn back and face his partner fully. “Is that what you want to hear?” Jack can’t be sorry for loving the kid. He can’t imagine being himself and there being any alternative to loving Mac... But- 

“I’m sorry I’ve upset you. But, dude... What else can I say? _I can’t help it_ , man,” Jack confesses. “Apparently I can’t even hide that I can’t help it, and _I’m sorry_!”

Jack’s voice breaks embarrassingly, right in the middle, because as he’s speaking he sees the hurt in Mac’s face blossom and Mac’s face just- It just _shatters_.

Jack’s seen the kid take blows that would have knocked a lesser man plumb out - been right there with him on ops they’d stumbled more than walked out of, limping to exfil down one functioning leg apiece and with less intact ribs between the two of them than they’d started out with, and Jack’s never seen Mac’s face crumple.

And _Jack_ did that. 

By being greedy. By wanting more than the poor kid can give. Mac’s told Jack all about his childhood - about losing his mom and his grandpa in one year, and his dad micromanaging every aspect of their lives in the immediate aftermath. Only to cut ties with Mac completely when Mac refused to pursue the career his dad wanted for him later on and enlisted instead.

Jack knows Mac’s never gotten over that - over being made to feel like he’d failed someone he’d cared for, simply because they hadn’t wanted the same things. And here Jack’s gone and made Mac feel the same way.

Well, he’s not going to let Mac drive off tonight thinking that another man’s selfishness is going to cost him yet another important relationship. If their friendship means enough to Mac that he looks this broken up about the threat Jack’s unrequited feelings pose to it - enough that they’re having this conversation instead of him just cutting Jack out of his life - then surely he must be open to continuing it so long as they can get past the discomfort Jack’s caused. Jack just has to make it clear that he understands his role - and his responsibility - in making that happen.

“Look, Angus...” Jack says resolutely, unable to directly look Mac in the eyes but taking a shaky breath and managing to get damned close. “I care about you, man,” he says softly. “Nevermind... everything else. I care about you. Too much damned much for some one-sided feelings to get in the way of our partnership. Of our friendship.”

Jack doesn’t understand what about his saying that makes Mac flinch. If anything, the man looks more miserable, around his eyes and his mouth, than he had a moment before. But he looks less- _Terrified_ , Jack realizes, swallowing. Less frightened of how Jack might react to his calling out Jack’s feelings and actually discussing them. He looks less strung tight with tension, and that’s something Jack thinks.

It’ll have to be.

“Me too,” Mac says simply, voice thick but honest.

Jack channels all of what little emotional stamina he has left into meeting Mac’s eyes again, so that his own honesty can’t be missed. 

“This is _my_ bad, alright?” he makes himself confess. “I know that. I do. I’ll make it right. Just. Just give me some time.”

Mac huffs out a breath like he’s about taken as much as he can take of all this emotional fallout as well, and the sound is entirely too much like a sob for Jack’s fractured resilience. Something glints in the streetlight pouring through Mac’s windshield, running down Mac’s cheek, and it’s all Jack can do not to explode out of the passenger door and run to hide himself inside his home where he can weep openly in response to that alone.

“How do you expect to ‘make this right’, Jack?” Mac asks, tone a mix of miserable, angry, _and_ indignant - apparently tonight’s 'Unpleasant Emotions Jack Dalton Has Inspired’ trifecta. 

Maybe Jack can reassure Mac _tomorrow_. 

Tonight discretion’s looking like the only part of valor that’s not going to end with Jack bawling in the cab of his young friend’s truck like a legitimate basketcase.

“I don’t know, Mac,” Jack says wetly, pasting as placating a smile across his quivering lips as he can manage. “I’m not the first old fool who’s fallen in love with a beautiful boy way out of his league, and I’m sure I won’t be the last. I’m sure I’ll figure out something that’ll work.”

Then Jack bails.

He’s just mastered his quaking hands well enough to get his key in his door, to turn it and turn the knob in the right order, and to push the door open a crack when 160 pounds of former Delta special forces pushes past him, the palm of one large hand meeting the front of Jack’s door flatly, propelling it open the rest of the way, and the other wrapping around Jack’s upper arm and taking Jack with him as he steps into Jack’s home and slams his front door shut again.

Jack’s back hits the wall between his door and hall mirror about the same time that his door relatches, with Mac already latched onto him, those big, gun-calloused hands with their incongruously long, delicate fingers, framing Jack’s face, making Jack’s brain scratch and re-load with an impromptu re-analysis of the violence of Mac’s actions.

The protest Jack had been about to make catches and dies in Jack’s throat at the new information pouring in from that touch alone - and from the sight of Mac’s eyes, here in the proper lighting provided via the hall light Jack never turns off. They’re still as wet as Jack had guessed them to be in the car, but they’re also opened wide now. 

That look of terror Jack had glimpsed on Mac’s face before, it had been the kind of terror Jack’s seen on Mac’s face facing armed combatants across the heads of civilian casualties, at risk of being caught in the crossfire. 

The terror on Mac’s face now- It was the look Mac wore the day _Jack_ got caught in a crossfire, before he’d been able to tell that it was only a fleshwound his bullet had opened up in Jack's side (because Jack had been pigheaded and disobeyed Mac’s direct orders to stay to the left, out of his way.)

It’s the Mac-face equivalent of saying the words ‘Oh god, did I do this?’

“Say that again,” Mac commands inexplicably.

“Mac, what the-”

“Jack, _please_ ,” Mac says, sounding as close to begging Jack to shut up as Jack’s ever heard him, so he does. “What did you just say to me?”

Okay, so Jack can be dumb. But he _is_ a genius. 

The way that Mac is looking at him... his hands - combined with the words spoken in the truck, rerun through Jack’s head on the fly and re-evaluated for meaning in light of this new evidence-

Had Jack considered hope a pitiful emotion while he’d thought it was dying?

Well, it’s a glorious, glorious thing as Jack numbly says, “I said I’m an old fool for falling in love with y-”

Mac’s mouth descends on his before he gets another word out.

Once they’ve talked it all out-

Well. Once they’ve talked _most_ of it out - the important bits - and outsourced all the rest to the conversation had between two bodies that have longed to touch for much too long...

Mac gives Jack that side-eye he gives him sometimes, one corner of his lips twitched upwards in the lopsided smirk that Jack fell in love with first.

They’re lying side by side in Jack’s bed, still breathing heavily - one head per pillow, but Jack’s right limbs and Mac’s left limbs tangled so that they’re still, essentially, touching. 

That makes _this_ smirk the best smirk Jack’s ever gotten from his badass with a big heart, and Jack can’t stop grinning.

“I can’t believe _you_ had to have _me_ tell you what’s up. You’re the only one of us who’s ever done this before,” Mac says.

“ _No_ one’s ever done this before, sweetheart,” Jack says. “You and me? _ogether_ together? It’s going to be the thing of legends.... The thing of George TJones’ love songs. Besides, you weren’t exactly picking up everything I was putting down either, tough guy.”

Mac laughs and rolls his eyes at Jack, but he melts too. He’s apparently been hiding his feelings from Jack just as carefully as Jack’s been trying - and somehow succeeding - to hide his feelings from him. Because that soft look that steals over Mac’s face, just before his smirk turns into a full-out grin and Mac rolls over to straddle him...

That’s what it looks like to melt.

What Jack feels with his arms and lap full of Mac... with Mac softly kissing his lips, like it’s an honor he’s still not used to having and he’s trying to soak it in-

This is what melting _feels_ like.

 _Now_ Jack’s certain.


End file.
